


A House Made Out Of Each Other

by katkrap



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Spoilers, pregame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 08:37:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katkrap/pseuds/katkrap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contains Major Spoilers.  Rosalind and Robert Lutece begin Exercise 123.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A House Made Out Of Each Other

**Author's Note:**

> ONCE AGAIN, MAJOR SPOILERS. DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT COMPLETED THE GAME.
> 
> This is one of my all-time favorite franchises, written by my favorite writer in the video game industry. I'm hesitant to write Bioshock and Infinite fic, but I love these characters too damn much. Expect a lot of nods, a lot of Shakespeare, and a lot of feels. Title taken from "Tiny Glowing Screens Part 2" by George Watsky. Fragment quoted at the end of the document.

               Robert was meticulous.  That was something he and Rosalind both shared in common.  There was little they did _not_ share, Robert reflected as he walked upstairs to the workroom.  They shared the same copper hair, the same bright blue-green eyes that changed due to light and mood; green then blue then green again, then blue.  They came from the same parents, departed from the same womb under the same circumstances on the same day at the same hour at the same moment under the same stars.  They shared the same birthmark on the hip where the doctor had had to reach down, pull them from their mother’s body.  Where he had to disentangle the birthing chord that had wrapped itself round their neck.  They shared the same pink skin and the same wharling nebula of impossible freckles that spun down their shoulders and backs, dusted their noses and cheeks.   They shared like minds, like inventions, and like idiosyncrasies. 

               Rosalind had tried to control that variable at the start.  When he took his coffee black, she filled her cup with cream and sugar.  When he preferred to stand at a board and work out the equations, she claimed to prefer sitting at a desk.  It hadn’t lasted more than a few hours before she confessed the ruse, bitterly pouring out her coffee into the flowerbed outside the window.  Robert did not tell her that he had known she was lying.  He hadn’t needed to.  He _knew_ that he hadn’t needed to, just as well as she did.  And it wouldn’t have served any purpose in telling her.

               They were not twins.  Not really.  Not fraternally, nor scientifically.  There was no shared womb, no petri dish.  But they were not limited to twain.  There were billions upon billions of them, a sky of Luteces, as infinite as lighthouses or freckles.  But they had found each other.  That was the only reality that mattered.

               Their reality.  Their experiment.  And the variables.  Always the variables.

               He walked into the workroom.  He was unsurprised to find it empty.  Disappointed, perhaps, but unsurprised.  Rosalind was only half-present, and had been since experiment ninety-seven when they had failed to find a tear and found themselves trapped on the wharf of Battleship Bay, looking down as orange and purple fire ate up the bright neon of the city.  It hadn’t been the first Manhattan he’d watched burn.  In fact, he’d watched Manhattan burn in more than a dozen realities.  And he was aware that at any given moment, billions upon billions of Manhattans were burning, and with so many fires in so many worlds, Robert couldn’t help but wonder why it was that his hands were always so cold?

               He took a sheet of paper from his pocket and jotted the notes into the equations on the board.  He tallied the variables, the constants.  The coin toss was always heads, virtually a constant.  The telegram always ignored.  The pick always seventy-seven. The warnings never heeded.  The bird.  The cage.  The baptism.  The slaughter.  The burning.  A billion wicked songs played on a billion tin pipes while a billion girls fell through the clouds and—

               He shut his eyes tightly, reaching up and rubbing a knuckle into his temple.  He slowed his breathing, steadied his thoughts.  The experiment had never been a matter of ‘what if?’ but ‘why?’  Why, in a world of infinites, were they limited to the same results. A city burns.  A city drowns.  A girl lives or a girl dies and nothing changes.  In a world of infinites, why were the results so singular?

               He did the math, made the changes that were needed and gathered the variables.  There was to be a telegram this time.  It was not the first telegram—they’d tracked the potential of a telegram in experiments twelve through thirty-eight—but had brought it back after experiment one-sixteen.  Perhaps this time it would be heeded.  He prepared the coin, the plate, the board to track their results.  Robert had become convinced that the coin was the key, that if the toss failed to be heads, the whole exercise could be undone.  Rosalind argued the coin had no influence on the exercise.  That to put such stock in a piece of stamped metal was no different than lighting a candle under a stained glass window and muttering empty prayers, be they to a virgin or a man.

               As always, she stressed the constants.  And she stressed the variables.

               The pendants had been Rosalind’s idea.  She had produced them sometime around experiment sixty-three.  She’d walked into the work room, right up to his desk and held them up until he’d turned to look at her.  “Variables,” she said, snapping the boxes shut and holding one out to him.  “You take the bird.  Seems rather more your type.”

               “What is it intended to mean?” Robert asked, opening the box and examining the cameo, a fine silver filigree of a bird against a black background, covered in an egg-rounded glass.

               Rosalind did not look back at him.  “What is any of it intended to mean?  You insist on your experiments.  And I am bored.”  She shrugged and set her box down on her worktable.  “Not every piece quantifiable data is relevent.”

In the beginning, it had been late nights and black coffee, writing figures and graphing equations until their fingers were raw.  He’d misplace his projections and she would lose pencils in her hair.  They’d fight and argue and prove and disprove, laugh and boast and fall asleep in their chairs in two inelegant heaps until morning found them.  Then they would brew the morning’s coffee.  Then the work would begin.  Each day was new.  New data.  New possibility.  New problems.

               Then came the prophet, which would have been simple enough.  If not for the child.  Robert had made his feelings on the matter clear to Rosalind.  Too little too late, she’d argued, but he would not be quieted.  He’d shouted himself hoarse that night.  As had she.  He’d thought her indifferent to his threats until he heard her crying in the library as he began packing his things.  The next morning he’d found her at the chalkboard, mapping out equations.  She’d given him a wicked smile and told him she could do all the work herself if he’d rather sleep.  He’d smiled and made them coffee. 

Nothing could stop them.  Not the prophet and not his assassin.  They walked the razor of possible and infinite for what felt like years and might have only been days, with nothing to hinder them.

               So why did it feel like it was getting harder?

               There were still late nights and black coffee, but his fingers were always raw from the writing.  He never misplaced any of the data or projections anymore, but she’d stopped using pencils.  She’d stopped helping him at all.  She’d sit at her worktable, staring at him with those seaglass eyes, sharp and cold, never saying a word but to finish his thoughts.  And even in the echo, he could hear the slant to her tone.  There was no fighting.  No arguing or boasting or working until they collapsed in their easy chairs from exhaustion.  There was no trial and error, only the exercise.

               Robert continued working his knuckle against his temple, began plugging in numbers with his free hand.  Erasing mistakes, projecting the possible, mapping the probable.  He didn’t hear the door open, didn’t see her walk to her table or hear her clear her throat.  He didn’t hear a thing until she set the box on her table, set it down with enough force to break his concentration.  By the time he looked up, she was walking from the room.  “Where are you going?”

               Rosalind turned.  “Where I am going isn’t the question.  The question should be where are you going?”

               Robert blinked.  “Are we being rhetorical?”

               “On the contrary,” Rosalind said, walking back toward her table.  “We are being quite literal.”  She picked up the box she’d just set down, covered in fine velvet the color of robin’s eggs.  “Take it,” she said, holding it out to him.

               Robert didn’t need to open the box to know what was inside.  The cameo of the cage.  He did not take it.

               Rosalind tossed the box at his chest, watched it bounce off his chest and fall to the floor as he stood, clench-fisted and unmoving.  She tossed her nose into the air and started toward the door.  Robert’s hands went so tight he snapped the chalk in his fingers.  He dropped the pieces to the ground, following her out of the room.

               He shoved through the doors with both hands, hurrying to the railing and finding her on the stairs.  He raised his voice enough to be heard.  “I _will_ leave, _sister_.”

               “I will believe it when it happens, _brother_.”

               He was already down the stairs, following her into the kitchen.  “Is that it then?” he demanded.  “You are giving up on the experiment—?”

               “There was never an experiment to give up on,” Rosalind snapped, her tone gone sharp as she rounded on him.  “You see a canvas, I see a blueprint—”

               “I thought I saw a blank page and you saw _King Lear_ —”

               “It does not matter how it is staged, Lear will never live.”

               “If Lear never goes into the rain, who can say who will live and who will die?!” Robert shouted.  “If Lear yields to Cordelia, if he recognizes the snakes of his court—”

               “Then scholars everywhere will have no play to discuss—”

               “You are avoiding the conversation.”

               Rosalind gestured with a stiff arm, her jaw gone tight.  “I am looking at the _values_ and the _progression_ and the _details_.  A variable is _not_ a variable when it is a _constant_.  Lear is constant.  You are testing if a coin will hit the floor if dropped, denying that gravity is a constant.  Dropping the coin one billion times will not change gravity.”

               “Anything can be called a constant until it varies,” Robert argued.  “The world was _constantly_ flat until it became a _variable_.”

               “But the earth is _quantifiable_ ,” Rosalind argued.  “It is _finite_.  How many times must an experiment be completed in an infinite environment before you recognize the constants?”

               “In an _infinite_ environment can there be any _true_ _constants_?”

               Rosalind lifted a knuckle to her temple and rubbed hard.  “Robert—”

               “What did you expect me to say up there?” he snapped.

               “I didn’t expect you to say anything.  I wouldn’t.”

               “And I didn’t.”

               “Then you’re leaving?”

               “What would leaving accomplish?”

               “What would _staying_ accomplish?”

               Robert smirked.  “Are we Lear, now?”

               She smirked the same wicked grin back at him, a softened reflection of himself.  “Have we always been?”

               Robert’s smile vanished and his throat worked.  “I do not wish to be.”

               “One does not _wish_ in matters of _science_.”  She said ‘wish’ the way many Columbians said ‘Vox Populi’.

               Robert’s jaw worked and carefully, he said, “I cannot bring myself to believe that we are no more than dust bottlenecked into an endless circle of events.”

               “The data—”

               “Data be damned.”

               Rosalind folded her arms under her breast and frowned at him.  “You sound less and less like a scientist every time we run the experiment,” she murmured.  “What do you expect each time?  Before that coin hits the plate, what change do you hope to see?”

               Robert said nothing.  Just leaned against the kitchen counter and stared at the other himself.  Herself?  Themself?

               Rosalind’s expression was a blank, chin high as her eyes examined his equally empty expression.  “Occam’s Razor, Robert.  The simplest answer is typically the correct one.   If one thing is constant without variable, how many times must we throw ourselves at it until we recognize it for what it is?”

               Robert retained his silence.

               Rosalind’s head tilted ever so slightly to the side, eyes going narrow.  “This isn’t about the child.  Or Dewitt.  Or Manhattan, is it?”

               Robert’s eyes narrowed, always mimicking her expression whether he wanted to or not.  “If it is none of the three, what then?”

               “Us,” she chuckled.  “You.  Me.”  Her gaze left him, going off over his left shoulder as she considered vacantly.  “Is salvation something that can be measured and tested?  If you undo what has been done, does it really undo what has already been done in a billion, billion worlds?”

               Robert felt himself flush from toes to hairline, cherry skin bright against the copper of his hair and the dull spray of freckles over the bridge of his nose.  “I require no salvation,” he snapped.

               “But you require _one_ _variable_ to relieve your guilt,” Rosalind murmured.

               “It should be _our_ guilt.”

               “Should it?” Rosalind asked.  “I have no care whether the exercise succeeds or fails—”

               She jumped as Robert slammed a hand down on the table, startling an unfinished cup of coffee off the table as her blue-green eyes went wide.  “A billion cities in a billion skies with billions of billions of people are burning in a billion worlds _and you. don’t. **care?!**_ ” he bellowed.  “A billion children are torn from the arms of a billion fathers and a billion cities are ruled by a billion Edmunds and Regans and Gonerils and Cornwalls and a billions eyes are plucked from a billion honorable faces while a billion kings rage against a billion storms and a billion fools are murdered while a billion cities are burning!  _They are always burning!_   I close my eyes and all I ever see is the _burning_! I hear them _screaming_ , I hear the music—a constant consonant phrase on tin pipes—and I cannot wake because Manhattan is always burning and children are always dying and _yes_!  Yes, I want to find _one world_ where Manhattan is not burning, and there are no mad kings! I want to sit on a beach and not hear the screaming of a billion worlds!  You ask if I accept the constants when the possibility of one variable remains and _I do not!  I **cannot!**_   And if that means doing the _whole bloody experiment myself, then I—”_

               For a moment a billion stars flashed into his vision.  His legs went out from under him and he heard Rosalind shout his name.  Cold swarmed over his body, radiating from every pore; an impossible cold that could only be known after knowing the heat of a billion burning Manhattans. The stars cleared from his eyes, an out of focus kitchen coming back into form.  Rosalind had her arms around his waist, struggling to steady him against the kitchen counter.  The room spun at every angle and Robert reached a hand back to support himself on the kitchen counter.  His head pulsed as Rosalind came back into focus.  She reached a hand to his face and he tried to pull away.  His mouth struggled to form a question, but instead lulled open, ringing with the empty sound of an unasked question.  Her eyes were wide, but not from surprise; damp, but not from the smoke of a city on fire.  It was the look of a woman who knew her city was about to burn, and that she could not stop it.  Rosalind wiped across his upper lip with a shaky hand.

               Her fingers came back bloody.

               For a long while, neither spoke.  The two halves of the same whole stared at the red on Rosalind’s fingertips, shaking and impossibly cold.

               The moment passed.  Rosalind peeled herself off Robert, moved to the sink and rinsed the blood of her hand.  She wetted a rag, sniffing hard and blinking back the dampness in her eyes before turning to face him again.  She wiped the blood from his face, eyes threatening to well-up again when the bleeding did not stop.  She held the rag in place, breathing slowly in and out her nose, forcing her hands to be still.  Forcing herself to be iron and unyielding.  Sometimes Robert remembered the cliché of women and the gentler sex and it made him smile.  His female self was iron.  She was unbending and unbroken.  She had built a city in the sky and apologized to no one.  When he remembered these things, he felt remarkably proud.

               Rosalind held the rag in place for several minutes, finally pulling the cloth away, giving him one final swipe and announcing with shaky certainty, “it’s stopped.”

               Robert felt his right nostril, still hooked to a deep migraine that had begun throbbing at the back of his skull.  He looked at his clean hands, shaking as he flexed and extended his fingers, forcing the blood back into them.  He cleared his throat and pushed away from the counter.  “I’ve work to do,” he mumbled.

               “Robert,” Rosalind said, her voice a ragged whisper.  But he was already on the stair, already in the workroom.  He laid out the variables on the table, made certain everything was accounted for.  He erased the last experiment’s numbers from the board, prepared the new equations, the empty letters in which the new variables—not constants, never constants—would be placed upon his return.

               He raised a trembling hand to his nose, pulled it away clean.  It was a good sign.  He couldn’t afford to consider what it might mean if it was not.  His head was still throbbing as he shrugged on a raincoat, galoshes and a great, brimmed hat to match the coat.  It would take longer to reach the lighthouse with only one person rowing.  But perhaps that was a variable that he hadn’t yet considered.  He walked to corner of the room, looking down at what looked like a poorly sewn seam.  But it was not attached to any fabric.  It flickered and twisted in the air where the wallpaper met the windowpane, all static and electricity and ozone and neon and possibility and constant and variable.  The tear seemed to sense him.  It began twisting and snapping like a live spark, like it might take his arm off if he reached down inside it and _pulled_.  His migraine throbbed again and he reached up and rubbed a knuckle into his temple again.  He pressed hard, as though he could force the pain into his hand so he might rinse it off as easily as Rosalind had rinsed the blood from her hand.  He was still fretting over his headache when the tear hissed and flickered, unfurled itself in a rush of salt spray and rain.  He hadn’t touched it.

               He looked to his left where Rosalind stood, yellow coat, yellow hat, and galoshes.  She had the wooden box he’d failed to remember tucked under one arm, the pair of oars he’d also neglected under the other arm.  She gave him a smile.  “You would forget your head if I weren’t here to remind you to keep it on your shoulders.”

               He couldn’t help but smile.  “And how many times have I corrected your equations because you had failed to remember the order of operations?”

               “Once,” she said with a shrug.  Then a warm smile.  “But it was greatly appreciated.”

               Robert regarded her for a long moment, finally murmuring, “I thought you had given up on the experiment.  Too many constants, you said.”

               Rosalind returned his long consideration with one of her own, her expression distant again as she searched for the proper words.  “I stand by what I’ve said.  I don’t believe in the exercise.  I don’t know that I ever will.  However, in an infinite world of infinite variables, the only thing I have found constant is our ability to press at the edges of what we do and do not know.  If we are myself, and I am ourselves and we are each other then…”  She gave a heavy sigh.  “I suppose you’ve already made up our minds.”

               Robert smirked.  “Tricky.”

               “Always,” she chuckled, holding out the oars.  “You mind the boat,” she announced as he took them from her.  “I’ll mind the box.”

               Robert sighed.  “Once more unto the breach, then?”

               “That’s _Henry V_.”

               “There aren’t many suitable lines from _Lear_.”

               Rosalind wrinkled her nose at the storm raging just beyond the floorboards of the workroom, the boards of the dock.  Their faces were spritzed with seawater as the flags on the dock jumped and thrashed in the gale.  “Blow, Winds,” Rosalind murmured, “and crack your cheeks.  Rage.  Blow.”

               Robert sighed.  “Not near so dramatic.”

               “But appropriate.”

               “Quite.”  Robert stepped down to the dock and offered Rosalind his hand.  She took it and stepped down with him.  She lifted a hand and pulled the tear close.  For a long while, they stared at the seam, flickering like lightning, thrashing like a living creature that would savage them if were to ever get loose…

               “Do you want the honors?” Rosalind asked.

               Robert sighed.  “I suppose it would be appropriate.”

               “How many does this make, then?”

               Robert reached down.  “One-hundred-and-twenty-three.”

               “Are you ready?”

               Robert’s hand twitched at the seam of the tear, feeling the energy make his fingertips ache.  Despite the rain, he had to swallow to wet his throat.  Very quietly, he looked back at Rosalind and murmured, “no.”

               Rosalind managed to bite back a smile, giving him a curt nod.  “That makes two of us, then.”

               “Two of us, or one of us?”

               “Yes.”

               Robert chuckled.  Reaching down, he pressed his fingers inside the tear.  His arm was a buzz of numbness, cold and heat and pins and needles. 

Taking a deep breath of stingingly cold sea air, he reached into a universe where Manhattan had not yet burned, wrapped his hand around the seam… and pulled.

**Author's Note:**

> "We’re every age at once and tucked inside ourselves like Russian nesting dolls  
> My mother is an 8 year old girl  
> My grandson is a 74 year old retiree whose kidneys just failed  
> And that’s the glue between me and you  
> That’s the screws and nails  
> We live in a house made of each other  
> And if that sounds strange that’s because it is"
> 
> -George Watsky


End file.
